For many commercial enterprises, it is a challenge to implement information technology strategies that can deal effectively with the constantly changing and accelerating data requirements of the business world, especially in the financial services area. Effective and efficient systems and processes are essential to the success of any business that needs to capture, store, and manipulate transaction data and, for audit purposes, to track and report changes made to the data.
For example, a variety of regulatory requirements (e.g, SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, Patriot Act, Anti-Money Laundering, and others) have been imposed on financial service providers that drive the need for more comprehensive financial record-keeping. Each of these regulatory requirements often demands its own peculiar data report format and content from the service provider. This often results in placing stressful demands on the time and resources of the service provider to prepare accurate and complete reports of the necessary transaction data.
The SEC, for example, typically requests the following information from a financial service provider: account transfers—list all transfers between client accounts during a given time period; account activity—list all activity for each client account during a given time period; new accounts—list all new accounts that a firm began managing during a given time period; and, closed accounts—list all accounts that a firm stopped managing during a given time period.
In many situations, the interaction of a user with a transaction system involves work that spans multiple tables, and potentially multiple database-level transactions. Many conventional audit systems only capture database changes on an individual table-by-table basis, however, and cannot assemble and summarize the data changes into an intelligible format for the user to review and use. For audit reasons, many conventional applications maintain all historical data records within the same tables as the operational data of a transaction system. This creates operational overhead, however, when users attempt to access current data, and it adds complexity when users try to archive or retrieve historical data in association with performing an audit.
In view of the issues and problems described above, more effective and efficient systems and processes are needed that can address the deficiencies of conventional systems and processes for auditing data changes in transaction systems.